Archive for month: December, 2010

Who is the mayor of the mount? Is it Ariela Ross, the one who on Foursquare is crowned the mayor? Or does the title — and the significant wealth, honor, prestige, and free fries— belong to a humble Jerusalem blogger named David Abitbol?

For Ariela Ross, being the “mayor” of Al-Aksa Mosque and the Old City’s entire Muslim and Christian Quarters is quite natural – as these are the places where she spends much of her spare time….With 66 total “check-ins” as of Wednesday afternoon, Al-Aksa’s coveted mayorship currently remains in Ross’s hands through her own nine check-ins on the increasingly popular smartphone application called Foursquare, which allows users to tell their friends exactly where they are at any given time.

She visited the mosque at the invitation of the mother of a Muslim boyfriend, a Bedouin Israeli, but she admitted that many of her check-ins were not strictly from within the mosque itself. “Usually I’m sitting right outside of it,” she said, “but I didn’t see any reason to create a new location” on Foursquare.

As for Abitbol, he frequents the Temple Mount because “it’s really pretty, the workmanship on the mosques is remarkable, the views are great and, most importantly, it is the holiest site in Judaism.”

While he would like to see the Jewish Temple rebuilt one day, he said, he expects the restoration to happen by divine intervention—”not by man.”

A few things I don’t get is how she can be called a nice Jewish girl in the article headline, [Disputed Territories: Nice Jewish Girl Claims Foursquare Mayorship of Temple Mount] and admit to dating a Muslim, and admitting to phantom check-ins.

Jewlicious has posted many pictures of himself on the Temple Mount. If Ross is the true Mayor, wouldn’t it be right to have a

bunch of photos of her on the Temple Mount too? Our researchers looked through her Twitpic account and found none.

Which is why I am writing this whole piece to begin with.

Jewlicious aka David Abitbol is clearly the Foursquare Mayor of the Temple Mount fair and uhm, square. He takes pictures every time he is there. There are no secret visits, or check-in’s during non-Muslim hours.

http://rabbiyonah.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/cropped-RabbiYonahbookCover11.jpg00rabbiyonahhttp://rabbiyonah.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/cropped-RabbiYonahbookCover11.jpgrabbiyonah2010-12-28 14:04:492010-12-28 14:04:49Jewlicious, The Temple Mount, and The Future Of Jerusalem on Foursquare

Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Millenniums before Wallace Shawn delivered up that pearl of wisdom in “The Princess Bride,” Cleopatra seems to have intuited as much. She nonetheless financed Antony’s military expedition to the restive area east of the Tigris, a multiethnic, multicultural region of shifting alliances, one that had resisted 30 years of Roman efforts at organization. The Roman general who had last ventured that way had not returned. His severed head wound up as a prop in a royal production of Euripides. His legions were slaughtered. Antony fared only marginally better. Asian allies double-crossed him. Guerrilla tactics and treacherous geography undid him. At the conclusion of a demoralizing campaign and a disastrous retreat he had lost some 24,000 men. Cleopatra bailed him out.

After Golda Meir came for a visit to the White House, the following was recorded:

An indication of Nixon’s complex relationship with Jews came the afternoon Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, came to visit on March 1, 1973. The tapes capture Meir offering warm and effusive thanks to Nixon for the way he had treated her and Israel.

But moments after she left, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were brutally dismissive in response to requests that the United States press the Soviet Union to permit Jews to emigrate and escape persecution there.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”